I dont know what to think, really.
The Dekaif channel has 434 videos, but YouTube is only showing 275 to clients, whether logged in or not, whether yt-dlp or official access.
This isn’t the first channel I’ve witnessed this, and weirder stuff, on. Another example is this video - “Belt” meme - it is accessible on Grayjay, yet not on YouTube, meaning (I think) that publicly shared videos are being deindexed, and yet they are still hosted.
You used to be able to take the video code from the URL (everything after ‘?v=’ and before ‘&’) and get the exact video in search results. Not now. The second YouTuber, Sparky, has 35 uploads, only 9 of which are visible. And I can attest that at least one of the remaining 26 is hosted, but invisible. I don’t even know how it came up using Grayjay but not YouTube or Revanced.
Basically, there’s a TON of shady underhanded shit happening at YTHQ and everyone needs to jump ship to Odysee, Peertube or some platform that won’t be clogged with AI. This is bad for everyone.
I’m posting it here mainly because I verified my findings with yt-dlp, and this new bs is successfully thwarting my attempts to archive.
3rd Oct edit: I am seeing massive differences in indexed videos versus archived videos. I am currently aggregating but the definitely affected videos range from 10% to 50%
PeerTube is a hard sell. Finding things to watch on there is a pain since most instances are trash. Only ones I can think of that are worth using are diode.zone and tilvids. Tilvids is nice but a lot of their material is uploaded from YouTube and the sponsorships are still embedded. If Sponsorblock was configured to work with it though it would be interesting.
You can always roll your own instance if you have the hardware to spare. I don’t recommend hosting on a VPS as that defeats the purpose of self-hosting as you’re hosting on someone else’s computer at the end of the day and that’s no different than signing up for an existing public instance and posting there, other than you’re paying for that VPS.
I’m talking from a viewer’s perspective. There is very little I can watch on PeerTube. Now, if I wanted to share videos on the internet as a hobby PeerTube would be the obvious choice. But as a platform to spend time in, it falls short.
It’s not PeerTube’s fault, it’s just sadly Google can walk all over YouTubers all year long and they wouldn’t even consider publishing on multiple platforms. It’s quite telling that only YouTube competetor that got any traction at all is one with a video library mirroring tool so that the channel owner never has to touch it.
Unless you’ve got Google/Alphabet money, and a willingness to be in the red for years before maybe becoming profitable, it’s essentially impossible to create a platform like YouTube.
I think it is possible, either by charging money, or by decentralizing like PeerTube. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. YouTubers won’t switch, they just don’t care.